CFP: Curious Games’18

We are inviting submissions to the first international workshop on curiosity in games, co-located with the Foundations of Digital Games 2018 conference in Malmö, Sweden on August 7–10, 2018. Submissions are due May 31, 2018.

Curiosity is emerging as an important source of gameplay engagement in HCI. At the same time, game design has begun to develop and test models and tools for affording curiosity in gameplay. AI researchers in parallel are developing computational formalizations like artificial curiosity, novelty detection, or motivated reinforcement learning to model players, predict player experience, create effective and enjoyable non-player characters, or procedurally generate interesting game content. Despite this rich and growing work on human and computational curiosity, there is little multidisciplinary dialogue on how to measure, model, and drive curiosity in and through games. This one-day workshop therefore convenes game HCI, design, and AI researchers to establish and advance the state of the art in curiosity in games.

Topics of Special Interest

  • Designing for curiosity in games
  • Models and measures of player state and trait curiosity and interest around gameplay
  • Artificial curiosity, novelty search, and related AI techniques for player modeling, game agents, and procedural content generation
  • Using computational models of curiosity for player psychology – and vice versa
  • Using curiosity design insights for computational models – and vice versa
  • Using psychological models of curiosity for design – and vice versa

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission: May 31, 2018, 11:59 pm Pacific Time
  • Notification to Authors: June 8, 2018
  • One-day workshop: August 7-10, 2018 (exact day TBD) at FDG in Malmö, Sweden

How to Submit

We invite participants to submit 2-6pp. papers (including references) in the FDG paper format (http://fdg2018.org/#information_for_authors) via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=curiousgames18. Ever paper will receive a double peer review and meta-review. We aim to accept 15-20 papers based on relevance, quality, and diversity of inputs. We expressly invite participants to bring system demos to the event.

Accepted submissions will be allocated a 10-20 min presentation slot and invited to submit an extended paper version to a Special Issue on curiosity in games in the IEEE Transactions on Games (confirmation pending).

Organizers

Sebastian Deterding is a senior research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York. His work explores formalizing and validating models, guidelines, and tools for motivational design in and beyond games, more recently in intelligent, data/AI-driven interfaces. He has chaired numerous workshops at CHI (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017)

Davy Smith is an interdisciplinary researcher, focusing on curiosity as a creative and exploratory process from both design-led and algorithmic viewpoints. A former software developer in the creative industries and current postdoc at the Digital Creativity Labs, his recent work centred on the development of intrinsically motivated algorithms in neuroevolutionary computation.

Edward J. Powley is a senior lecturer at the Games
Academy and research fellow at the MetaMakers Institute at
Falmouth University, researching computational creativity and
artificial intelligence for games. His current work centers on
mixed-initiative, systems to democratize game design and
uncover novel design spaces

Jessica Hammer is an assistant professor at the HumanComputer Interaction Institute and Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work combines quantitative and qualitative HCI research with game design to understand how design decision affect how players act and feel, including several publications on how to design for curiosity.
Alexandra To is a PhD student in HCI at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work seeks to empower marginalized individuals through transformational games.

Christian Guckelsberger is a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Game Innovation Lab, and is currently working for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. His work explores how formal models of intrinsic motivation can advance computational creativity in and beyond games, e.g. employed in general NPC’s or the automatic prediction of player experience. He co-organised the first tutorial and co-authored a survey on intrinsic motivation in games.

Want to know more?

For further information, write to curiousgames18@easychair.org or see the workshop website, http://curious-games.org.

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